Today, a knowledge worker is deluged with written or otherwise-published information from books, reports, periodicals, the Internet and other sources, so much so that relevant information is often mixed and/or saved with information that is irrelevant or of no present interest to the worker. Much, although not all, of this information is often stored in one or more “data mines” for possible review at a later time. As this information accumulates, it becomes more and more difficult for the worker to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant and, more important, to distinguish the more relevant from the less relevant.
What is needed is a system that (1) allows a worker to identify “found” publications, in electronic format, that contain one or more uses of a specified word or word combination and (2) provides the worker with an assessment of the relative significance of phrases that often appear in the found publication, and of each found publication itself, based on a sequence of criteria with user-specified parameters. Preferably, the significance index should take into account one or more of the number of times and relative frequency of occurrence of the specified word/combination, separation distance between nearest-neighbor occurrences, occurrence of synonyms for the specified word/combination, and time interval(s) for the publication.